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Word of Mouth

Edmund Leach

The Interface between the Written and the Oral by Jack Goody
Cambridge, 328 pp, £27.50, July 1987, ISBN 0 521 33268 0

Jack Goody took early retirement from the prestigious post of William Wise Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and is now in a highly productive phase of his career. Indeed, if Cambridge University Press had not put many of his recent writings into a single series, it would be hard to keep track of all the things he has been up to. ‘Studies in Literacy, Family, Culture and the State’ so far contains eight titles, and in every case Jack Goody is author or editor. In four of these works the discussion focuses almost entirely on the problem of how ‘literacy’ affects the structure of a previously ‘non-literate’ society.